CHAPTER IV.
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow.
Shelley.
Willoughby. Here’s another definition for you:—Mysticism is the romance of religion. What do you say?
Gower. True to the spirit—not scientific, I fear.
Willoughby. Science be banished! Is not the history of mysticism bright with stories of dazzling spiritual enterprise, sombre with tragedies of the soul, stored with records of the achievements and the woes of martyrdom and saintship? Has it not reconciled, as by enchantment, the most opposite extremes of theory and practice? See it, in theory, verging repeatedly on pantheism, ego-theism, nihilism. See it, in practice, producing some of the most glorious examples of humility, benevolence, and untiring self-devotion. Has it not commanded, with its indescribable fascination, the most powerful natures and the most feeble—minds lofty with a noble disdain of life, or low with a weak disgust of it? If the self-torture it enacts seems hideous to our sobriety, what an attraction in its reward! It lays waste the soul with purgatorial pains—but it is to leave nothing there on which any fire may kindle after death. What a promise!—a perfect sanctification, a divine calm, fruition of heaven while yet upon the earth!
Atherton. Go on, Willoughby, I like your enthusiasm. Think of its adventures, too.
Willoughby. Aye, its adventures—both persecuted and canonized by kings and pontiffs; one age enrolling the mystic among the saints, another committing him to the inquisitor’s torch, or entombing him in the Bastille. And the principle indestructible after all—some minds always who must be religious mystically or not at all.
Atherton. I thought we might this evening enquire into the causes which tend continually to reproduce this religious phenomenon. You have suggested some already. Certain states of society have always fostered it. There have been times when all the real religion existing in a country appears to have been confined to its mystics.
Willoughby. In such an hour, how mysticism rises and does its deeds of spiritual chivalry——
Gower. Alas! Quixotic enough, sometimes.
Willoughby. How conspicuous, then, grows this inward devotion!—even the secular historian is compelled to say a word about it——
Atherton. And a sorry, superficial verdict he gives, too often.
Willoughby. How loud its protest against literalism, formality, scholasticism, human ordinances! what a strenuous reaction against the corruptions of priestcraft!
Atherton. But, on the other side, Willoughby—and here comes the pathetic part of its romance—mysticism is heard discoursing concerning things unutterable. It speaks, as one in a dream, of the third heaven, and of celestial experiences, and revelations fitter for angels than for men. Its stammering utterance, confused with excess of rapture labouring with emotions too huge or abstractions too subtile for words, becomes utterly unintelligible. Then it is misrepresented: falls a victim to reaction in its turn; the delirium is dieted by persecution, and it is consigned once more to secrecy and silence.
Gower. There, good night, and pleasant dreams to it!
Willoughby. It spins still in its sleep its mingled tissue of good and evil.
Atherton. A mixture truly. We must not blindly praise it in our hatred of formalism. We must not vaguely condemn it in our horror of extravagance.
Gower. What you have both been saying indicates at once three of the causes we are in search of,—indeed, the three chief ones, as I suppose: first of all, the reaction you speak of against the frigid formality of religious torpor; then, heart-weariness, the languishing longing for repose, the charm of mysticism for the selfish or the weak; and, last, the desire, so strong in some minds, to pierce the barriers that hide from man the unseen world—the charm of mysticism for the ardent and the strong.
Atherton. That shrinking from conflict, that passionate yearning after inaccessible rest, how universal is it; what wistful utterance it has found in every nation and every age; how it subdues us all, at times, and sinks us into languor.
Willoughby. Want of patience lies at the root—who was it said that he should have all eternity to rest in?
Atherton. Think how the traditions of every people have embellished with their utmost wealth of imagination some hidden spot upon the surface of the earth, which they have pourtrayed as secluded from all the tumult and the pain of time—a serene Eden—an ever-sunny Tempe—a vale of Avalon—a place beyond the sterner laws and rougher visitations of the common world—a fastness of perpetual calm, before which the tempests may blow their challenging horns in vain—they can win no entrance. Such, to the fancy of the Middle Age, was the famous temple of the Sangreal, with its dome of sapphire, its six-and-thirty towers, its crystal crosses, and its hangings of green samite, guarded by its knights, girded by impenetrable forest, glittering on the onyx summit of Mount Salvage, for ever invisible to every eye impure, inaccessible to every failing or faithless heart. Such, to the Hindoo, was the Cridavana meadow, among the heights of Mount Sitanta, full of flowers, of the song of birds, the hum of bees—‘languishing winds and murmuring falls of waters.’ Such was the secret mountain Kinkadulle, celebrated by Olaus Magnus, which stood in a region now covered only by moss or snow, but luxuriant once, in less degenerate days, with the spontaneous growth of every pleasant bough and goodly fruit. What places like these have been to the popular mind, even such a refuge for the Ideal from the pursuit of the Actual—that the attainment of Ecstasy, the height of Contemplation, the bliss of Union, has been for the mystic.
Gower. So those spiritual Lotos-eaters will only
——hearken what the inner spirit sings,
There is no joy but calm;
or, in their ‘fugitive and cloistered virtue,’ as Milton calls it, say,
——let us live and lie reclined
On the hills like gods together, careless of mankind.
Atherton. Some; not all, however. Neither should we suppose that even those who have sunk to such a state——
Willoughby. They would say—risen—
Atherton. Be it by sinking or rising, they have not been brought to that pass without a conflict. From life’s battle-field to the hospital of the hermitage has been but a step for a multitude of minds. Hiding themselves wounded from the victor (for the enemy they could not conquer shall not see and mock their sufferings), they call in the aid of an imaginative religionism to people their solitude with its glories. The Prometheus chained to his rock is comforted if the sea nymphs rise from the deep to visit him, and Ocean on his hippogriff draws near. And thus, let the gliding fancies of a life of dreams, and Imagination, the monarch of all their main of thought, visit the sorrow of these recluses, and they think they can forget the ravages of that evil which so vexed them once. Hence the mysticism of the visionary. He learns to crave ecstasies and revelations as at once his solace and his pride.
Gower. Is it not likely, too, that some of these mystics, in seasons of mental distress of which we have no record, tried Nature as a resource, and found her wanting? Such a disappointment would make that ascetic theory which repudiates the seen and actual, plausible and even welcome to them. After demanding of the natural world what it has not to bestow, they would hurry to the opposite extreme, and deny it any healing influence whatever. Go out into the woods and valleys, when your heart is rather harassed than bruised, and when you suffer from vexation more than grief. Then the trees all hold out their arms to you to relieve you of the burthen of your heavy thoughts; and the streams under the trees glance at you as they run by, and will carry away your trouble along with the fallen leaves; and the sweet-breathing air will draw it off together with the silver multitudes of the dew. But let it be with anguish or remorse in your heart that you go forth into Nature, and instead of your speaking her language, you make her speak yours. Your distress is then infused through all things, and clothes all things, and Nature only echoes, and seems to authenticate, your self-loathing or your hopelessness. Then you find the device of your sorrow on the argent shield of the moon, and see all the trees of the field weeping and wringing their hands with you, while the hills, seated at your side in sackcloth, look down upon you prostrate, and reprove you like the comforters of Job.
Atherton. Doubtless, many of these stricken spirits suffered such disappointment at some early period of their history. Failure was inevitable, and the disease was heightened. How Coleridge felt this when he says so mournfully in his Ode to Dejection,—
It were a vain endeavour
Though I should gaze for ever
On that green light that lingers in the west:
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life whose fountains are within.
Willoughby. The feeling of the other class we spoke of—the men of bolder temperament—has been this: ‘I am a king and yet a captive; submit I cannot; I care not to dream; I must in some way act.’
Gower. And, like Rasselas, a prince and yet a prisoner in the narrow valley, such a man, in his impatience, takes counsel of a philosopher, who promises to construct a pair of wings wherewith he shall overfly the summits that frown around him. The mystagogue is a philosopher such as Rasselas found, with a promise as large and a result as vain.
Atherton. Hence the mysticism of the theurgist, who will pass the bounds of the dreaded spirit-world; will dare all its horrors to seize one of its thrones; and aspires—a Manfred or a Zanoni—to lord it among the powers of the air.
Willoughby. And of the mysticism of the theosophist, too, whose science is an imagined inspiration, who writes about plants and minerals under a divine afflatus, and who will give you from the resources of his special revelation an explanation of every mystery.
Gower. The explanation, unhappily, the greatest mystery of all.
Atherton. Curiously enough, the Bible has been made to support mysticism by an interpretation, at one time too fanciful, at another too literal.
Willoughby. We may call it, perhaps, the innocent cause of mysticism with one class, its victim with another: the one, running into mysticism because they wrongly interpreted the Bible; the other interpreting it wrongly because they were mystics. The mystical interpreters of school and cloister belong to the latter order, and many a Covenanter and godly trooper of the Commonwealth to the former.
Gower. Not an unlikely result with the zealous Ironside—his reading limited to his English Bible and a few savoury treatises of divinity—pouring over the warlike story of ancient Israel, and identifying himself with the subjects of miraculous intervention, divine behest, and prophetic dream. How glorious would those days appear to such a man, when angels went and came among men; when, in the midst of his husbandry or handicraft, the servant of the Lord might be called aside to see some ‘great sight:’ when the fire dropped sudden down from heaven on the accepted altar, like a drop spilt from the lip of an angel’s fiery vial full of odours; when the Spirit of the Lord moved men at times, as Samson was moved in the camp of Dan, between Zorah and Eshtaol; and when the Lord sent men hither and thither by an inward impulse, as Elijah was sent from Gilgal to Bethel, and from Bethel back to Jericho, and from Jericho on to Jordan. Imagination would reproduce those marvels in the world within, though miracles could no longer cross his path in the world without. He would believe that to him also words were given to speak, and deeds to do; and that, whether in the house, the council, or the field, he was the Spirit’s chosen instrument and messenger.
Atherton. This is the practical and active kind of mysticism so prevalent in that age of religious wars, the seventeenth century.
Willoughby. The monks took the opposite course. While the Parliamentarian soldier was often seen endeavouring to adapt his life to a mistaken application of the Bible, the ascetic endeavoured to adapt the Bible to his mistaken life.
Gower. The New Testament not authorising the austerities of a Macarius or a Maximus, tradition must be called in——
Willoughby. And side by side with tradition, mystical interpretation. The Bible, it was pretended, must not be understood as always meaning what it seems to mean.
Atherton. It then becomes the favourite employment of the monk to detect this hidden meaning, and to make Scripture render to tradition the same service which the mask rendered to the ancient actor, not only disguising the face, but making the words go farther. To be thus busied was to secure two advantages at once; he had occupation for his leisure, and an answer for his adversaries.